How the Internet Mourns: "But What About the Kurds?"

A million years ago these
friends told me about a saying they’d taken on, that came from a
heated dinner party conversation. They were having an argument
about Armenia or Iraq or something, or Palestine, who knows, and it
was getting unreasonably heated due to the way these kinds of
conversations go, and finally at one point a woman banged on the
table and screamed, in an accent that I always do as “really fake
French”: BUT WHAT ABOUT ZE KURDS??? This is an argument
stopper akin to invoking Hitler. What about the Kurds? Let
us not discuss provisional governments or the rights of women or
whatever, when don’t you understand the Kurds are
suffering?

And that is basically what happened on the entire Internet this
weekend, after Amy Winehouse died, and because it was boiling hot
in 85% of North America, everyone was glued to their computers and
their Twitters and had to really let it fly. Some people made
jokes! Some people were offended by the jokes! Some people were
sad! Some people were upset that people would pay attention to
Winehouse’s death when a really, really, unbelievably horrible
thing had just happened in Norway. Some people were upset that
other people were being self-righteous! And really, no one had any
skin in the game. Everyone just got up in each others’ business.
Basically, no tweet went uncriticized!

To put it another way, here are the Seven
Stages of Internet Grieving, which starts with something like
“Unvarnished Personal Expression,” pauses at “Ill-Conceived and/or
Ill-Timed Joke” and ends with “Flipping Out on Everyone Because
Everyone Else is Doing It Wrong.” What an exhausting weekend!